Abstract

Heterogeneity of marginal shipping costs leads to persistent and volatile deviations in real exchange rate. In a two-country, three-good endowment general equilibrium model, arbitrage firms use a transportation technology which depends positively on distance and physical mass of goods. The model exhibits endogenous tradability, non-linearity of law of one price deviations and trade-inducing and suppressing substitution effects due to heterogeneity in trade costs. When endowments follow an AR(1) process that matches quarterly HP-filtered US and EU GDPs, and the aggregate trade costs consume 1.7% of GDP, persistence of real exchange rate matches the data. A model with quadratic adjustment costs also induces sufficient real exchange rate volatility.

[32] Piet Sercu, Raman Uppal, and Cynthia Van Hulle. The exchange rate in the presence of transaction costs: Implications for the tests of Purchasing Power Parity. Journal of Finance, L(4):1309{1319, September 1995.